Alongside this narrative of ageing is a parallel one of a woman ‘letting herself go’ if she doesn’t cover her grey hair. Frances Wright, 33, who found her first grey hair at 19 says: “I honestly think my mind has been totally warped by advertising. There’s a new advert I keep seeing about the ‘Roots Family’ who have visible grey roots and it’s made clear that the roots are unacceptable. It’s not that I’m scared of looking old, but I think it makes me look a bit undone.”

Rebecca Lewis, 30, who spotted her first grey at 13, has a similar story: “My mum cast doubt that I would get a job with grey hair because I think she thought it looked unprofessional. Sort of like, if I wasn’t diligent enough to dye my hair, I wasn’t diligent enough to do a good job.”

With little to contradict these two narratives, I did what every woman-on-a-budget does in a crisis; I headed to Boots and bought the first of many dark-brown box dyes. I felt an unidentifiable pressure to cover my white hair, something that Louise also felt. “Grey hair meant you were old and I certainly wasn’t that,” she says. Rebecca also felt this. “I didn’t feel the need to dye it until people, mainly my mum, started to suggest it to me. I thought it was quite cool at first, and then when others suggested that it wasn’t, I started to get a complex about it.”

“I’ve been dyeing my grey hair since I was 19 – 16 years on, I’ve learned to love it”